Nicaragua: From Sandino to Chavez by toni solo
www.dissidentvoice.org
October 7, 2005

"I come from the north
american embassy where I had a conference with ambassador Arthur Bliss
Lane who has assured me that the government in Washington supports and
recommends the elimination of Augusto Cesar Sandino, considering him
to be disruptive of peace in Nicaragua."

-- Anastasio Somoza to
National Guard colleagues, February 21, 1934 (from Sandino, General
de Hombres Libres by Gregorio Selser).

The
US government's murder of Augusto Cesar Sandino marked the culmination
of US government efforts to destroy Nicaragua's independence. Those
efforts first came to a head in 1910 with the use of the battle cruiser
Paducah to protect pro-US rebel forces holed up and cornered in
Bluefields on the Nicaraguan Atlantic Coast. US imperial military muscle
smoothed the way to the presidency for a US company employee, Adolfo
Diaz.

Diaz oversaw the imposition
of penal financial and trade terms through the Knox-Castrillo treaty and
the renunciation of Nicaragua's territorial sovereignty in the
Chamorro-Bryan treaty. In 1912, thousands of marines under General
Smedley Butler disembarked at the Pacific port of Corinto to crush
Nicaraguan Liberal party efforts to reclaim the country's sovereignty.
One of the baser hypocrisies of contemporary US collaborators in the
Nicaraguan ruling classes is the public lip service they pay to Liberal
martyr Benjamin Zeledon who died fighting US marines at that time.

Spiraling Contemporary Political Crisis

Reviewing the Adolfo Diaz period one realizes that patterns of US
imperial behavior, of Nicaraguan domestic resistance and oligarchical
betrayal, have changed little in the intervening century. Right now, a
sell-out government of mediocre placemen struggles to maintain some
shred of legitimacy, using a border dispute over the Rio San Juan with
Costa Rica as a smokescreen to cover its failures. As of this writing, a
handful of senior government ministers have skipped the country to avoid
a judicial process for electoral finance offences. Sandinista opposition
leader Daniel Ortega persistently calls for dialogue. President Bolaños
equally persistently insists on pre-conditions underwritten by foreign
allies.

The US State Department and the local US embassy intervene openly,
giving orders and making threats to local politicians, demonizing anyone
who resists their will. The dominant Nicaraguan oligarchy hurry to
impose yet another US-authored treaty -- this time the Central American
Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). They expect to do well out of it
themselves, while CAFTA's terms leave Nicaragua's poor majority and the
country's precious natural resources at the mercy of US corporate
investors.

Just as in 1910, it suits the United States and its allies who call the
shots for more vulnerable countries through control of the World Bank
and the IMF to suggest that Nicaragua is especially corrupt and
especially poorly governed. It is an image promoted precisely to explain
away the hopeless results of their own crass institutional and political
intervention in Nicaragua's internal affairs. Self-serving
interpretations of the current crisis in Nicaragua projected abroad by
the Organization of American States, the international financial
institutions, the US State Department, the European Union and the United
Nations leave out a fundamental fact. If Nicaragua is in crisis it is
because those organizations' own interventions have fomented one to
serve their own ends against the interests of Nicaragua's impoverished
majority. Maybe a good place to start is with the issue of corruption.

Do As We Say...

Foreign officials love to point the finger at former presidents Arnoldo
Aleman and Daniel Ortega, pretending that current President Enrique
Bolaños is some kind of Mr. Clean. But look who's talking. The IMF and
the World Bank have a disgraceful record of setting up vulnerable
countries economies for international corporate predators. Remember
Argentina's economic meltdown? Giant Wall Street financial houses made
fortunes for their shareholders before hanging Argentina's people out to
dry -- all under the benevolent gaze of the IMF and the World Bank.
Argentina is just one of many similar examples of IMF and World Bank
infamy.

The international financial and trade institutions are hotbeds of
corporate crony corruption. Bush-Cheney groupie Paul Wolfowitz heads up
the World Bank while former French financial giant Credit Lyonnais
pin-up Pascal Lamy runs the World Trade Organization. These people are
little more than smarter, bigger-scale operators than your average
racketeer. The outcome for ordinary people who are their victims seldom
varies. The poor and vulnerable pay dearly while characters like
Wolfowitz and Lamy plot yet more loot-and-pillage ops with the global
corporate elite they represent.

Po-faced international financial bureaucrats get their message
reinforced by political accomplices in the US and Europe. But few take
seriously strictures on corruption from a US regime responsible for the
billion dollar corporate scams perpetrated in Iraq or the current
corporate pork-and-gravy pell-mell after the disasters in the southern
US. The European Union too is rife with corruption. Just a few years ago
the whole European Commission resigned in recognition of their
responsibility in failing to rein in corrupt abuses.

Their cosmetic symbolic gesture changed little. EU bureaucrat-speak
about "transparency" covers up persistent corporate wheeler-dealing
behind the scenes and significant mis-management of resources as regular
minor scandals -- like that around Eurostat -- make very clear. The
cases of individuals like French President Jacques Chirac, former German
Chancellor Helmut Kohl, current Italian President Silvio Berlusconi, the
sleaze-ridden Blair government in the UK, all indicate how prevalent
corruption is in Europe. Clearly, few countries and certainly not the
European Union or the US, have any business lecturing impoverished
countries like Nicaragua on corruption. Still, they do.

The Nicaraguan version

During Violeta Chamorro's 1990-1996 presidency, anti-Sandinista media
and politician's took pleasure in lambasting Daniel Ortega and the
Sandinista FSLN for the so-called "piñata" (a children's party game with
a scramble for caramels as the prize). The outgoing 1990 Sandinista
government recompensed its soon-to-be-redundant functionaries with gifts
of State-owned property, vehicles and equipment. Subsequently, Violeta
Chamorro's cronies had few qualms about helping themselves with a large
spoon to great dollops of public resources under the auspices of
wholesale IMF and World Bank mandated privatization, as well as more
routine self-enrichment at public expense.

But it was the 1996-2002 administration headed up by Arnoldo Aleman and
Enrique Bolaños who took self-aggrandizement by public officials to
extremes in Nicaragua only matched by the former Somoza dynasty. They
bled well over US$100 million from public coffers. Much of the money
went on doubling up official salaries on the quiet. That fact explains
why so many of Aleman's Constitutional Liberal Party (PLC) still support
him and view Bolaños as a contemptible turncoat. It explains much of the
breakdown of presidential authority in the country.

Nicaragua has no established permanent civil service. Almost all public
officials lose their jobs with every change of government. So people
naturally seek to provide for an uncertain future while they have the
chance. Is the revolving door system between public and private
corporate life much different in the US or Europe? Is Tony Blair's
widely publicized entree to the board of war-providers-to-the-empire
Carlyle Group anything more than a fat payoff for political services
rendered? No wonder people in countries like Nicaragua view US and
European strictures on corruption with healthy skepticism.

And so it goes with all the other wails of lamentation so beloved of
foreign officials in Nicaragua. The politicized judiciary, the
legislative assembly dominated by big party machines, small parties
struggling for electoral viability -- all are common fixtures in many
countries around the world, in the US particularly. But foreign
officials in Nicaragua regularly pronounce and expound as if none of it
has ever happened anywhere, ever before. Such pap is loyally repeated by
domestic parrots in Nicaragua's political and media classes.

Nicaragua is awash with latter-day Adolfo Diazes and Emiliano Chamorros.
President Enrique Bolaños and his ministers as well as opportunist
"centrist" wannabes like Eduardo Montealegre and Herty Lewites regularly
and insistently denigrate "El Pacto" -- the political deal between the
dominant Sandinista and Liberal parties. They use the term "El Pacto,"
well knowing it is loaded with all the history of shameful betrayals of
which Nicaragua has had more than its fair share. So far the Nicaraguan
media have strung along with the one-way propaganda ridicule.

It is striking that Nicaraguan journalists never point out to Bolaños
that his deal with the US embassy and other foreign governments stinks
as badly as the Chamorro-Bryan and Knox-Castrillo treaties ever did.
They never point out to Montealegre and Lewites, who have publicly
declared a deal to collaborate, that their own "Pacto" is at least as
questionable as that between the leadership of the FSLN Sandinista party
and the PLC Liberal party. It is by no means necessary to support
Arnoldo Aleman or Daniel Ortega in order to note the rank hypocrisy and
cynical opportunism of astute political sharpsters like Lewites and
Montealegre and desperate failures like President Bolaños.

Fundamentals of the crisis

Nicaragua is like the rest of Central America, only more so. The major
social issues are widespread poverty and demographic migration. The
major economic issues are unemployment and under-investment. The major
environmental issue is water-resources management. The energy crisis
provoked by oil price rises only makes these existing problems worse. As
ever, foreign governments and the corporations they serve are only
interested in Nicaragua for what they can get out of it.

They seek cheap labor to inflate their profits, disinvesting in their
own countries in the name of the "free market". They want good transit
infrastructure for their own strategic and business purposes, not for
the integral purposes of Nicaragua's population. They want high profits
from the sale of Nicaragua's natural resources, for their share-holders,
not for people in Nicaragua. If they can finish off stripping
Nicaragua's public resources under privatizations extorted by IMF
conditionality, all the better. For them a weak government in Managua is
good policy.

They want to deregulate capital controls to be able to shift their
hot-money off-shore as and when they need, for both financial and
political reasons. They want equal or preferential treatment in
comparison with local national businesses because "a level-playing
field" means hugely one-sided advantages to them, given their massive
international resources. They want investment rules that shift
arbitration outside national jurisdiction where corporate-friendly
judges will tend to rule in their favor and against the interests of
distant impoverished masses. All this the IMF and the World Bank are
anxious to make happen as tools of the US government and its allies.

It is that external imperialist dynamic -- ripping off people in
Nicaragua to serve foreign interests -- that has provoked the country's
political crisis. The European Union, the United States, the World Bank,
the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, the Organization of
American States and a plethora of other smaller foreign and multilateral
outfits all play their part one way or another in this systematic
gangsterism. It is all smeared over with a film of obnoxious moralistic
posturing.

So long as Arnoldo Aleman played ball during his presidency, none of
these organizations spoke out, just mumbling discontent from time to
time in the wings. Now they stick up for Aleman's former accomplice,
Enrique Bolaños. Suave foreign barbarians like US Ambassador Paul
Trivelli, following on from his interim predecessor Embassy Charge
d'Affaires Oliver Garza, openly attack the opposition Sandinista and PLC
political parties. European Union spokespeople question perfectly
legitimate attempts by the National Assembly to subject electoral
finance irregularities to judicial process -- exactly what led to the
political demise of Christian Democrat strongman Helmut Kohl in
Germany.

The double standards are self-evident. Perhaps the most interesting
response is the lack of one in the Nicaraguan media. Almost uniformly
the two main dailies El Nuevo Diario and La Prensa and
virtually all the television media editorialize mimicking foreign
spokespersons. They seem to be playing a game of pretending that there
is some unquestioned mushy "centrist" "moderate" social-democrat-style
political "modernity" that all "reasonable" people should support.

One practical effect of that is that they seldom press
flavor-of-the-month favorites like Herty Lewites or Eduardo Montealegre
to define political positions -- on CAFTA for example, or on water
privatization, or education and health policy. Real politics appear to
have been abandoned while the crisis floats through a kind of weightless
make-believe that self-serving foreigners are in fact humanitarian
altruists entitled to intervene, whose only concern is the best for the
Nicaraguan people. One has only to consider the fates of Iraq, Palestine
or Haiti to realize what these foreign interests really represent.

Let's put a figure to that. Plenty of small Nicaraguan community
organizations deliver education, health and social services to people on
tiny budgets thanks to the gutting of central government by foreign
intervention. A typical example would be a community development outfit
with a budget of US$60,000 a year delivering a mixture of services to
about 400 people a month. So the total number of direct and indirect
beneficiaries would be around 1800. Now, that figure US$60,000
constitutes a typical annual salary and benefits package for just one
middle level foreign official working for their government or some
multilateral outfit like the UN or the World Bank. So please don't let's
hear that they are in Nicaragua for the good of the Nicaraguan people --
that sum just don't add up.

From Sandino to Chavez

The US government organized assassination of Sandino may have marked a
kind of ending. But in other ways his murder only postponed matters.
Towards the end of his short life Sandino was calling for coordinated
action throughout Latin America to confront US regional and continental
ambitions. If any one person has inherited and taken up Sandino's vision
it is Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez. The resemblances are hardly
accidental.

When Chavez calls for Latin American unity and regional economic
integration based on a continental social charter, he is taking up again
the business Anastasio Somoza tried to have buried in Managua's
Larreynaga field that February night in 1934. Like Sandino, Chavez
believes people in Latin America can and should sort out their political
and economic arrangements to suit themselves without foreign
impositions. That is why the United States government would like to have
him killed. That is why European governments cravenly refuse to denounce
US intervention.

The traditional oligarchy in Nicaragua wants their country to be a
colonial adjunct of the United States as they always have done. In that
they seem to be supported by "centrist" and social-democrat style
politicians like Eduardo Montealegre and Herty Lewites. They, like the
Liberal PLC party, dominated by Arnoldo Aleman will deal with imperial
agents like Paul Trivelli in the local US embassy so long as they get an
appropriate share of whatever political benefits and perquisites are on
offer.

The only political force in Nicaragua openly and determinedly defending
Nicaragua's independence is the Sandinista FSLN. The tension between
Adolfo Diaz-style sell out to US imperial scheming and Augusto Cesar
Sandino's vision of Nicaragua's place within a united sovereign Latin
America is again defining politics in Nicaragua. The energy crisis and
Venezuela's obviously decisive role in any resolution it may have lend
an unpredictable new dynamic to an old pattern of regional politics.

Sandino's vision of Latin American dignity and autonomy, renewed and
revitalized by Hugo Chavez, simply refuses to die. Both the US
government and the European Union are anxious to keep Nicaragua as a
loyal, secure satrapy of the US empire. Nicaragua is a country
traditionally perceived to be strategically important for its location
on the American isthmus. Just as it did in Haiti, the European Union
will support the US government in doing whatever it takes to squash
potential moves towards autonomy by Nicaragua through alignment with
Venezuela. The current crisis in Nicaragua should be seen in that
overall context.

toni solo is an
activist based in Central America. He can be reached via his web site:
www.tonisolo.net.